Founded in 1952, the American University Law Review is the oldest and largest student-run publication at the American University Washington College of Law (WCL) and publishes six issues each year. As WCL’s flagship law review, the Law Review is ranked among the top law journals in the United States, according to the Washington and Lee University Law Library.

The Law Review receives approximately 1,500 submissions annually and publishes a wide range of legal scholarship from professors, judges, practicing lawyers, and renowned legal thinkers. The Law Review has published articles or commentary by Supreme Court Chief Justices Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and Earl Warren, as well as Associate Justices Hugo Black, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Arthur Goldberg. The Law Review has also published articles or commentary by prominent legal figures such as Stephen Bright, Paul Butler, Erwin Chemerinsky, Tom Goldstein, Paul Kamenar, Judge Paul Michel, Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Nadine Strossen, and Laurence Tribe.

In addition to serving as an academic forum for legal scholarship and a research tool for professors and practitioners, the Law Review is committed to developing the writing and research skills of its staff. The Law Review showcases student-written pieces by publishing notes and comments, unrestricted in terms of subject or area of the law, in each issue. In support of the staff, the Law Review has an esteemed faculty advisory board, including Professors Ira P. Robbins, Elizabeth Beske, Walter Effross, Christine Haight Farley, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Paul Figley, Angi Porter, and Stephen Wermiel.

The Law Review is the only journal in the nation to publish an annual issue dedicated to decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit regarding patent law, international trade, government contracts, veterans affairs, and trademark law. A member of the National Conference of International Law Journals, the Law Review is also indexed in LexisNexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, the Index to Legal Periodicals, and the Resource Index/Current Law Index. Each edition of the Law Review is distributed nationally and abroad to law school libraries, private law firms, public legal organizations, and individual subscribers.

With more than seventy years of publications, the Law Review has a strong national and international alumni network, including judges and practitioners in every field.

The Law Review also houses an online companion publication called the Forum. The Forum serves as a platform to generate timely discussion of scholarship published in the Law Review’s print issues. It enables the academic discourse within the Law Review’s print issues to continue after publication. The Forum also creates more opportunity to advance student-written scholarship by publishing notes and comments written by Law Review staff members. Like the print publication, the Forum is available on HeinOnline, WestLaw, and LexisNexis, as well as through the Law Review’s website.